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Apple's Move May Make AAC Music Industry Standard
stivi writes "BusinessWeek has up an article about a war: a standards war in the online music business. Apple's recent deal with EMI to sell DRM-free songs from the publisher's catalog on iTunes may clinch the iPod's AAC format as the industry standard. The article talks about possible reasons why AAC might marginalize WMA, as well as deals with some of the implications of drm-free aac-standardized industry. 'Online music stores, like Napster, Yahoo Music, URGE, and all the others that sell WMA songs will be forced to consider jumping into the DRM-free AAC camp, and thus become iPod compatible, and in so doing become competitors of iTunes. Apple will be fine with this, because in its range of priorities, anything that sells more iPods can only be a good thing. With time, practically all music stores will be selling iPod-compatible songs. This will be considered a Richter 10 event at Microsoft.'"
Exactly. In addition, if one reads EMI's announcement about them selling DRM-free music, it's clear that it's neither AAC nor iTunes exclusive. Other music stores will be selling EMI's songs in mp3 format soon, and nothing will have changed with respect to the popularity of mp3 vs AAC.
AAC isn't proprietary to Apple, it's part of the MPEG-4 standard.
g
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Audio_Codin
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
I honestly expect better from well known sources like Business Week.
EMI clearly said that music stores could made their own choice as to which digital format to make their catalog available in. WMA, AAC, MP3... It is up to the music store who licenses EMI's catalog to decide what format to make the music available in. Apple has chosen AAC. Frankly, I wish they had gone with MP3 since every music player under the sun supports MP3 playback. But with the way people who license the MP3 codec have been being successfully sued for large amounts of bank lately, I can see why Apple would avoid MP3 if they can.
You haven't been looking hard enough. iRiver has been making OGG-compatible players for years (no, they don't require reflashing with RockBox for this).
I'm listening to Oggs on my H320 with factory firmware as I type this.
Unfortunately, their newest players don't do Ogg any more. I recommend that you get another good player, the Cowon iAudio X5 or X5L. It has 30GB and plays Oggs.
aac is an open standard. wma is not free, mp3 is not free.
Believe it or not, MP3 actually has more patent issues than AAC at this point. Supposedly, if you run an online store, you have to pay royalties on every song sold to MP3-related patent holders. AFAIK, AACs don't require royalties to be paid per-song. There are also outstanding lawsuits regarding MP3.
So even though it may make sense to you, as a consumer, to stick with mp3, it may not make sense to a business. So if you imagine that MP3 is disqualified, what else is likely to become the defacto standard for online music stores? To answer that, you might want to ask yourself, "Besides MP3, what other formats play on the most popular portable music player?"
Yeah, that pretty much means AAC. It's not that I wouldn't like it to be something that's completely unencumbered by patents, but either way, it's better than dealing with Windows Media files.
Did you not read what you JUST quoted? It supports MP3's, from 16 to 320Kbps (this is constant bitrate), AS WELL AS MP3 VBR.
I was there was a -1 Incorrect mod.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
And even so its apparently the #2 music store with a significantly higher market share then other competitors.
Market share for online music retailers:
Apple iTunes: 67%
eMusic: 11%
Real Rhapsody: 4%
Napster: 4%
MSN Music: 3%
Ummm... there are licensing fees for AAC as well.
c fm?product=MPEG-4AAC
http://www.vialicensing.com/Licensing/MPEG4_fees.
Cheers.
Mark
From your link:
"# Are there use fees for MPEG-4 Audio?
No. License fees are due on the sale of encoders and/or decoders only. There are no patent license fees due on the distribution of bit-stream encoded in an MPEG-4 Audio format, whether such bit-streams are broadcast, streamed over a network, or provided on physical media.
[i]MP3 is probably a little cheaper for licensing and has wider support.[/i]
Actually, AAC is an open standard and is royalty-free - it would cost other manufacturers to add AAC support to their players (as Sony already has - they have added AAC support to some of ther Walkman devices through firmware updates).
Vorbis "Ogg" kicks mucho butt when compared to AAC. Not that AAC is horrible or anything... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorbis
Ligaguinggligagiggagoogoogwillgo
In contrast with the MP3 format, which requires royalty payments on distributed content, no licenses or payments are required to be able to stream or distribute content in AAC format. This reason alone makes AAC a much more attractive format for distributing content, particularly streaming content (such as Internet radio).
However, a patent license is required for all manufacturers or developers of AAC codecs. It is for this reason FOSS implementations such as FAAC and FAAD are distributed in source form only, in order to avoid patent infringement.
AAC requires a patent license, and thus uses proprietary technology. But contrary to popular belief, it is not the property of a single company, having been developed in a standards-making organization.
"It ain't a war against drugs.it's a war against personal freedom" --Bill Hicks
> the fraun-created 128k (yes, really) files are VERY close to the 44.1k cd sources in .wav format.
Try listening to classical music sometime, not pop music.
Euhm, MP3 cheaper? No way, if you want it legal in the US, you'll have to pay our best friends with the patents and royalties and since multiple organizations claim to have patents on MP3, different countries have different enforcers, I think in the US it's Thomson and in Europe it's Fraunhofer. The same is valid for WMA
AAC is an 'open' industry standard, not requiring licensing or royalties to be paid for streaming or distribution. It's also better in that it requires less space for the same quality, or allows for more quality in the same space, something music sellers really like.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Because...AAC is OPEN & ya know, FREE? You can put a proprietary DRM wrapper on ANY audio format which is what Apple did.
There are plenty of comment with direct links and quotes, so you can get the full scoop. But AAC licenses, the ones you quote, are for the players, not for the music stores.
MP3 has license fees for distribution, which means that the music stores pay a fee as well as the device manufacturer. With AAC the device manufacturer pays, but the music store does not.
Shawn's Tech Articles
Yes it does. Like MP3 it's patent infested: Well, yes and no - semantically, I was considering royalties and patent licensing fees as separate entities. AAC decoder licensing fees run as low as $0.12 per unit, whereas MP3 licensing fees appear to be independent of volume of devices sold and cost ~$0.75 per unit. Additionally, the sale of mp3 files costs the seller 2-3% of their gross revenue from the sales in royalties - the sale of AAC files does not require royalty payments. So yes, while AAC is not free per se, it is in fact cheaper than mp3 for both hardware manufacturers and content distributors.
The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources. - Albert Einstein
Exactly. Apple does not own AAC. In fact, AAC is a format that is a subset of MP4, the next generation of MP3. Apple, Dolby Labs, Fraunhoffer and others got together and created this better specification for lossy audio. And who invented MP3? Fraunhoffer.
Stop all this Apple hatin'
CD
I don't think there's such a thing as "AAC-lossless". I think you're confused about Apple Lossless Audio Compression (ALAC), which is the same idea as FLAC, only different. I've heard that the main difference is that ALAC requires less CPU activity to decode (and therefore less battery drain) than FLAC.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
iPods do not use MPEG-4 SLS, but rather Apple's own propietary format, Apple Lossless.
Only "open and free" to a certain extent: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Audio_Coding #Licensing_and_patents
Why are so many people so stupid when it comes to AAC? Everyone jumps on it as a proprietary format owned be Apple with license fees and can only be played on iPods.
NONE OF THIS IS TRUE.
It's an open standard, not owned by Apple, it's free to distribute content in AAC (not sure about fees for putting AAC support in a player), and there are plenty of AAC compatible players out there. The only thing nefarious about it was Apple's DRM, and hopefully that is on the way out.
that's not true, aside from compressing more, FLAC decodes significantly faster than ALAC. see http://flac.sourceforge.net/comparison.html
FLAC - Free Lossless Audio Codec
More to the point, they are going to sell DRM-free at a premium, and only a limited catalogue
The "premium" only applies to purchasing single tracks. Album prices are unaffected.
That's very misleading. mp3 is MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3, AAC is part of the MPEG-4 specification, .mp4 refers to the container format of the MPEG-4 specification that's based on .mov and can contain a large number of different video, audio and other streams in a number of different codecs.
So an overall better codec. at 128kbs it sounds roughly the same as an 196kbs mp3. Or roughly the same as an OGG at the same bit rate.
This is also misleading, although AAC *is* better. With codecs like these, the only thing that is fixed is the actual bitstream, leaving a lot of leeway to the different encoders. An mp3 encoded with an excellent encoder will be superior to an AAC by a mediocre encoder (e.g. I don't know about Quicktime's aac encodes but its AVC is complete and utter shit, even though AVC is an excellent spec). Also cpu-time constraints can have a serious impact on encoding quality, although that's normally not an issue if you do the encoding on a PC.
One big advantage of AAC are advanced features like 5.1 channels and such. There are hacks to tack on lots of features to mp3 but it lacks the (relatively) clean specs of MPEG-4 and it often lead to all kinds of problems.
the 256kbs mp4 that EMI wants to sell drm free is only good news.
yes, it is. (Good Apple; good EMI too btw, even though it took too long until they saw the light)
MP3's staying power is odd. one can add support for both easily, yet most players seem to think WMA is the only way to go. They could support MP4, MP3, and WMA.
It's not odd. Mp3 is the 800 pound gorilla of music formats and noone can do without it. Apple refused to share its DRM system with anyone (bad Apple), so for most competitors WMA was the easiest way to provide customers the capability to buy music (well, Big-4 music) online, thanks to MS's Played-for-Sure(TM) (until they got the URGE(TM) to squirt(TM) stuff all over the place =) and iirc it's the default spit out by WMP if you tell it to encode something for you. Few non-iPod owners use AAC, so there was no real reason to implement it (similar problem as Vorbis).
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
Or roughly the same as an OGG at the same bit rate.
Ogg (not OGG, it's not an acronym) is a container format, not a codec. I guarantee that an Ogg Speex file would sound way worse than an AAC at the same bit rate, and AAC can't beat Ogg FLAC at the same bit rate. It makes absolutely no sense to talk about what "OGG" sounds like, because it has absolutely *no* bearing on the sound quality *whatsoever*.
Licensing. AAC doesn't require royalties (it's a MPEG standard), but WMA is proprietary.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
Did you not read the news releases?
I've seen both. ALAC and FLAC decode about the same with the source I have here. The advantage to ALAC is that it has a nice transport - mp4 (m4a), and nice encoder (iTunes). Performance is neck-and-neck, otherwise. Source simplicity, which matters none to real people, is much in ALAC's favor. FLAC looks an awful lot like other Xiph products' source - very busy, and very little whitespace (i=1+23|more; all over the place), and SOOOOO many files, even if it compiles to a rather small 40 KB (decoder only). I realize FLAC was not a Xiph product at first, but funny it is how the source looks common to Xiph source. ALAC's source, ala Hammertime(ton), is a stroll in the park (easy) compared to FLAC's busy downtown streets and back alleyways (forever lost). Relatively, no one uses either, but more no ones use FLAC.
> they will be selling whatever format(s) customers demand since they have no motive to help Apple lockup the hardware market.
... good luck.
... there is no reason to use two audio file formats in these people's music collections, especially when the "new" one you want to add by using MP3 in 2007 is the old one, and it is fatter and sounds worse too.
Customers do not demand audio formats. They simply play CD's with a CD player, DVD's with DVD player, and audio files with their iPod. If you are selling audio files that don't play on iPod
And the music industry does have an incentive to help Apple "lock up the hardware market". If a listener has an iPod they can buy a track from you and then THEY CAN PLAY IT. It's a little feature really, but Apple is the only one offering it. All other file-based music playback is computer geek only and that is a shame. Microsoft's stuff fails to play songs that the user has legitimately bought-and-paid-for and is way too hard to use also. Apple also has a system that enables a user to collect 10,000 or 20,000 or more songs while most other vendors want a hero cookie for getting 10 songs onto a phone. So an iPod user is a more attractive music consumer simply because they can consume more music.
> If EMI is willing to A) give up DRM and B) allow non-Apple retailers in the deal why would they mandate AAC?
AAC DOES NOT HAVE A CONTENT TAX
A percentage of every MP3 or WMA sold goes to the encoder maker, like a DVD or a PlayStation game. With AAC, the content producer or owner keeps both the vig and the complete ownership of their audio material, like a CD or QuickTime. The MPEG-4 standard was held up for many months arguing over this part. Apple threatened not to make QuickTime MPEG-4 compatible unless this was changed to match the needs of content producers. It is a total non-starter when you suggest to a music producer or record company that they are going to pay a cut of each sale to a tool maker. We are happy to pay for tools and encoders but we don't want to hear from the tool-maker's lawyers that they own part of our newest hit single.
AAC HAS A BETTER PATENT SITUATION
AAC patents are well-defined, recent, domestic to the U.S. (important to some) and incorporate practical aspects of today's music industry and the Internet, while MP3 is pre-Internet, patents are murky, it is not domestic to the U.S., and what's more the underground street cred of MP3 due to file-sharing is considered a BAD thing by the music industry, the controversial nature of MP3 is considered a bad thing to build your entire business on. Further, AAC is designed by Dolby who are a music industry staple, while MP3 is rooted in video. AAC has a better technical rep in audio than MP3 even before you hear them. If the audio quality was exactly the same, the music industry would still choose AAC due to reputation. Counter-intuitive to the file-sharer, I know.
AAC DESIGNED TO ENCODE MUSIC AS WELL AS MOVIES
The huge drums, extreme sibilance, high volume, dense layers of frequencies and timbres, and very fast transients of modern music are way different than the speech, surf sounds, noises and rumbles that MP3 was designed for.
AAC 256 kbit/s BETTER THAN ANY POSSIBLE MP3
At double the bitrate of previous iTunes Store tracks, the 256 kbit/s AAC on iTunes is far better perceptual audio quality than the very fattest MP3 you can make, which at 320 kbit/s sounds like a 192 kbit/s AAC at best.
AAC IS iTUNES DEFAULT CD IMPORT FOR 4 YEARS NOW
Most users don't know how to change from the default AAC encoding in iTunes to another option, so their CD collections are now AAC collections and MP3 is something that they have maybe not even heard of. One interesting fact is that 90% of the iPods in existence, ever made, where sold in the last 3 years. Napster is something that iPod users' parents once enjoyed. We are out of the "tech industry" now when it comes to file-based audio playback and well into the grandmas
AAC H
> Don't really have an easy way to try AAC at 256K but I'd bet it is still distinguishable from a CD/flac.
... translucent. The low-end of the bass is chopped off, but the highs are there, although they show the most artifacts. Still listenable, though. Most especially when streaming over the Internet because it is so lightweight and yet sounds so good.
No, it really isn't distinguishable. I have very well-trained and experienced audio producer ears and I can't tell the difference unless I actually listen for it, and even then I have to look through a few frequencies before I find something. They are too close to care about in most cases. You would do better to worry about your headphones or speakers which in most cases suck ass.
AAC was designed to give "near CD quality" even at 64 kbit/s. The encoder will not reduce the sample rate of audio until you go below 64 kbit/s, so even at 64 kbit/s you are listening to 16-bit/44.1 kHz audio, same as CD, albeit with lossy encoding, stuff thrown away. It sounds a bit thin
When you go to 128 kbit/s it is supposed to be "CD quality" (not "near") and what you get is much thicker, more bass, less artifacts in the high end, and you feel more like you are listening to a CD, especially if you just listened to the 64 kbit/s version of the same song. This is the bitrate that was supposed to provide a CD quality experience in a file size that is small enough to be truly dangerous. This is the bitrate that most AAC is at, whether it is an iTunes Store music download or the audio track of a movie on HD disc. While it is not quite CD quality it is better than most of the audio most people hear most of the time.
But at 256 kbit/s you are getting the Cadillac of perceptual encoding. There is no MP3 that can match a 256 kbit/s AAC or even come close. A 320 kbit/s MP3 (total maximum) is just not nearly as good as 256 kbit/s AAC. The MP3 still has all kinds of artifacts at 320 kbit/s that are nowhere to be found in the AAC even though it is a smaller bitrate. Some of the artifacts you hear in MP3 are just MP3 artifacts that are there at all bitrates, but AAC starts better at the low end and gets better all the way up as you increase the bitrate. 256 is plush, thick, focused, tight fast highs.
Because they are giving away source, not binaries. So they are not distributing an encoder or decoder per se. They even acknowledge this.
A percentage of every MP3 or WMA sold goes to the encoder maker, like a DVD or a PlayStation game. Complete and utter bullshit. Distributing content in WMA without DRM has no licensing fees or royalties. Heck, MS's encoding software is free. Unlike you, I have a link.
The rest of you comment is pro-Apple fanboy gibberish. All bold statements with no facts or proof. No wonder you got modded up.